Comey Is Said to Have Become Unsettled by Interactions With Trump

Source: NY Times

WASHINGTON ó President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.

Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureauís investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquiries to the Justice Department, according to those people.

After explaining to Mr. Trump how communications with the F.B.I. should work, Mr. Comey believed he had effectively drawn the line after a series of encounters he had with the president and other White House officials that he felt jeopardized the F.B.I.ís independence. At the time, Mr. Comey was overseeing the investigation into links between Mr. Trumpís associates and Russia.

The day after the Flynn conversation, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Comey to help push back on reports in the news media that Mr. Trumpís associates had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign

8. Explains the nausea tho....

9. Source of new info is not anonymous, but a friend Mr. Wittes, from Brooking Insitution:

"Mr. Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, recalls a lunch he had with Mr. Comey in March at which Mr. Comey told him he had spent the first two months of Mr. Trumpís administration trying to preserve distance between the F.B.I. and the White House and educating it on the proper way to interact with the bureau.

Mr. Wittes said he never intended to publicly discuss his conversations with Mr. Comey. But after The New York Times reported earlier this month that shortly after his inauguration Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey for a loyalty pledge, Mr. Wittes said he saw Mr. Trumpís behavior in a ďmore menacing lightĒ and decided to speak out.

Mr. Wittes said that Mr. Comey told him that despite Mr. Trumpís attempts to build a personal relationship, he did not want to be friendly with the president and thought any conversation with him or personal contact was inappropriate."